All about the Scratch Programming Examples
Scratch Programming is a language developed with the aim to ease the activity of writing programs for the purpose of programming games, doing animations, enhancing music and more. Scratch programming examples were primarily designed to target children starting from the age of 10 years and older and was developed to teach people about the computational thought process and how a simple language can be a powerful building-block towards the approach of software development, which focuses more on developing a stable application rather than just syntaxes like C or C++.
What are Scratch Programming examples?
So, what exactly is Scratch programming examples? It’s exactly what it sounds like “Scratch”. Yes, it actually doesn’t matter whether you are a 25-year-old experienced programmer or just a parent who wants a year 10-year-old child to learn it. Because scratch programming examples are extremely easy to learn. And if you combine it with python programming, raspberry pi, and a few electronics, it just cants get any better.
Just in case if you are a beginner and want to learn something exciting, buy yourself a Raspberry Pi. It comes pre-installed with an Operating system called NOOBS(New Out Of the Box) which again comes pre-installed with Scratch. And if you don’t know what Raspberry Pi is, it’s a microcomputer. You can read my other blog on Raspberry Pi for further info on that topic.
How to get Started Scratch Programming examples?
Scratch programming examples were initially developed at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). As of to get you started, you can simply download the installer from the official MIT website: https://scratch.mit.edu/scratch_1.4/.
The current version of scratch is 1.4 as for the time when writing this blog. Scratch Programming examples are extremely fun to learn. To get more basics, you can simply download the official documentation from its website, which will give you an overview of scratch.
The basic requirements for scratch would be as follows:
800X600 Display or larger(though the official recommendation is 800×480, it lags like hell in that).
16-bit colour depth(32 bit recommended).
Win7 or later for Windows.
150 MB of disk space(200 recommended depending upon applications and modules installed).
512 MB of RAM or higher.
What all can Scratch do?
You can learn simulation from scratch. When I say simulation, it means it can create a virtual demonstration by imitating things that can be done in real life. You can also create Multimedia objects such as puzzles, 3d presentations, quizzes and many more. And if you are good at math, you can also create interactive and non-interactive Art Projects. Scratch programming examples are simply awesome for developing interactive musical instruments and Games as well.
But these are just the basics. You may be wondering what the real-world implications of Scratch are? So, let’s get on to it.
Scratch Programming exercises are an awesome language to get started with if you want to build a robotics career (if you are a pure beginner). If you are not satisfied with Raspberry Pi, you can buy a picoboard that looks like this:
Image Source: torproject.org
Picoboard is a piece of hardware that allows you to interact with the real world using scratch. It has a slider button and alligator clips and can also sense sound and light. Here scratch programming can be used to control robots, LEDs and various other sensors. If that’s not it, it can also control your microphone along with its volume sensor, Camera connected to it and a Joystick programmed to control your robot. In fact, a scratch can also be used to work with Arduino chipsets.
Ok, so What’s Next?
If you are still reading this section, it means that you are quite interested in scratch programming. So, let’s see what we have in the box next…
Scratch Programming was designed specifically to ensure creativity and to allow the developers to discover their own creative ideas and apply them in reality in the form of images and sounds to invent multimedia software’s on the go. A decent young programmer with just a few days of experience can develop games, create animations, and write a similar piece of codes with Scratch Projects.
The Scratch programming environment consists of a small screen space on which multiple programmable modules exist. These programmable are known as sprites. Sprite’s behaviour allows the sprite in the program to move around the display monitor and return a response when different events are triggered. These events include interactions with various similar sprites and user keyboard interactions.
Each sprite has a specific desired types of costumes available, which can modify its appearance on stage (remember the screen space I told you before) to produce different types of animations and effects. Sprite can also be used to make Speech bubbles and sounds along with mp3 files.
Here, the scratch coding in scratch language returns response by capturing blocks from the project applications and inserting them into the spaces requested for each programming syntax. This actually avoids the unnecessary hype to type in syntaxes and allows young minds (Kids and beginners) to develop programs with at least debugging as possible.
This thus discards out the possibility of syntax errors caused by typing in incorrect keywords. Every other sprite here contains multiple coded scripts which are programmed to run a sequence of operations that are activated and executed by sprite each time a specific event occurs. The control blocks here run iterations of syntaxes, the reason being they can be executed to be recursive as many numbers of times as needed or fall in a loop forever to define the nature of the sprite properly.
Conditional statements are similar to other languages, which allow multiple sequences of commands to be performed depending upon the current status of the Scratch programming exercises environment.
Scratch Mentality
Scratch Programming for beginners Projects was specifically designed to develop robotics and make it as easy as possible. I told you most of the things in the above para would probably go, bouncer, if you are reading this blog without installing scratch programming. Since scratch was made to inspire young developers, this was another reason why Scratch Programming allowed sprites to interact with each other by broadcasting messages mutually and responding quickly to these messages by calculating the distance to the nearest sprite.
Similarly, a large number of sprites can exist on a single stage, all of them behaving independently of each other without disrupting other sprites and enacting to others’ behaviour along with the innovation of other new behaviours.
Community and Project Hubs
Projects based on Scratch Programming are easily available online, and they can run on any web browser which supports Java applets. Scratch programmers are motivated to upload their projects on the Scratch Programming website (10 MB is the max file size, this encourages developers to write programs in the as compressed format as possible, leading to compact pieces of codes).
The projects are shared on the official scratch website. These are visible to every other person independent of registered users. This allows other users to download, modify and enumerate the program depending upon their requirement. This is somewhat similar to the likes of the Open source BSD-style license of Go Lang programming languages.
In Scratch Programming, Independent sprites can also be added and removed to and from the projects downloaded from the website. Scratch is more suited to developing applications based on the creation of small games, puzzles, entertainment programs and storytelling animations similar to that of flash programs. These are extremely easy with the help of sprites moving around the stage with sounds and speech bubbles.
A simple board like the picoboard and raspberry pi can also be purchased on Amazon, eBay, and SparkFun, which comes preinstalled with a few sensors, including light sensors (this is applicable only to pico board. Raspberry Pi comes independent of these sensors; however you can purchase them independently). This allows scratch developed programs to interact with the real world.
Conclusion
Scratch Programming is an awesome programming language, but it has its limitations too. However, if a programmer starts his basics from scratch, he will feel unconfident among other programmers who have C, C++, Python, or Ruby Programming experience. Scratch is just a piece of cake when compared to the languages to the likes of Java.
The reason is that scratch programming exercises were designed to motivate young programmers to easily develop applications that are intelligent and are also fun at the same time. These applications are thus attractive since they can interact with the user, change their on-screen appearance, move and make different sounds.
There is no specific rule here to write procedures or functions with variables, parameters, pointers, mathematical algorithms, indentations or networking. This makes scratch programming exercises less useful for advanced developers since they can’t do much with this kind of commands.
But not the ignore the fact that Scratch Programming exercises lessons provide a top-notch interface to enhance young programmer’s creativity and encourage them to build more programs and learn them by sharing. This can, however, be a good creative foundation for children’s whose parents want them in a creative field, be it animation or robotics.
Scratch Programming Language is not perfect, but it is, however, necessary. It introduces young developers to a totally new world and encourages schools to teach these to children who can further enhance their mentality.
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